Rest in Pink

If you’ve read any of my previous posts you’ll know that I find euthanizing a pet one of life’s more difficult and painful experiences. Yesterday Paulina described the death of Pink “…the mangy old tom cat who has brightened my days” and I asked her if I could share her private feelings because I’ve always liked her descriptions and she writes in a way that is poetic without being squishy sentimental. Similar to love there are different kinds of grief. She mentions “pureform” grief, as in simple (not to be confused with simplistic)…undiluted with conflicting emotions. This puzzled me because my own experience with grief has always seemed so layered that finding a pure form of it would be like the pure distillation of anything: more intense, more powerful, not subtle at all. But she describes it better than I do (posted with her permission),

“..I’m a person where the grief hits in waves, maybe in private (not much of a weeper); and the form my grieving takes here is at times the disbelief kind–still expecting him to Show Up, bang on my door, jump into my lap when I am sitting outside reading, greet my car… one of the manifestations of pureform mourning: you just keep expecting the beloved, the departed to appear/re-appear…

I was also thinking about how, even more so than most human-animal relations, this was a relationship of mutual courtship, and not an arranged marriage. It was truly a situation where I had been observing Pink’s spriteliness/pluck/beauty/drollery/humor/indefatigeable charm for months, letting him gradually approach–and I still remember the day he first jumped into my lap. He roamed around the nabe, and I was always amused and admiring of him: for a cat, he had true sentience and interactivity (would always look you in the eye. would talk with you, absolutely non-skittish and fearless, doglike in his aplomb. He would demand to be held or skritched or lie on your stomach, but then he would wander off…). and with time, he and I became ever more bonded, spent more time together. People told me that in the last year or so, he hung around my house even when I wasn’t home…There are no complicating ambivalences as most human love relationships have. He and I just dug each other, enjoyed each other’s company, and grew ever more fond with time.

I seem to run into a Great cat about once a decade: Sentiment, [in the 70s], Buck was my lord of flatbush I obtained from a private rescue catlady in queens in 1985; and Pink entered my life in 1995. I know I made the right decision to have him put to sleep (I noticed him drooling the day I brought him in to the vet, so obviously the tumor was really interfering with his ability to swallow) but the grief I feel over his death is of the most basic kind: of questioning why death has to exist (well, duh!) and why we lose those we love and all the classic dumbass shaking your hand against fate that all true mourners go through.

You don’t often find beings you connect with. Kindred spirits are so rare.

Pureform grief.”

At first I would think that missing something is such a human condition. Then I come home and my own cat is all over me as if he hasn’t seen me in weeks (no, it’s not about food) and I wonder if that’s just something we share with pets and something that happens with bonding of all kinds. Is it even a chemical thing? A form of pure emotion that manifests between two beings, happens with repeated contact and increases with mutual respect?

Thinking is not enough.
Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience — any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, no Final Satori, no final solution. Just conflict. Only thing can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for Fletch and Ruski, Spooner and Calico. Pure love.
What I feel for my cats present and past.
Love? What is It?
Most natural painkiller what there is.
LOVE.